ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The rise of individualism has long been acknowledged within the social and human sciences as an index of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (however marked by fits and starts, dead-ends and reversals). But recently, at least since the linguistic turn, this conceptual framework has been called into question on the grounds of its essentialist or exclusionary figuration of the human. Accordingly, I am interested in papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual.” I welcome studies devoted to any historical period, including those on contemporary literatures and the problematics of post-humanism, the death of the subject, relativism or skepticism, and from any perspective within literary studies, ranging from psychoanalysis and feminism to critical theory and beyond. I also welcome studies on any national context, including Latin American, African, and Asian literatures, that might provide a counter-narrative or contestation to the Western claim on the rise of the (modern, Western) subject, self, or individual.

Friday, March 24

Geetha Ramanathan, West Chester University
“Questioning the Modernist Subject”
Anna Foca, University of Sussex/University of Zurich
“The Failure of Liberal Selfhood in Invisible Man”
Nigel Joseph, University of Western Ontario
“Locke’s Disciplined Self and the Postcolonial Novel”
Sara Maurer, University of Notre Dame
“Sovereign Dispossession: Ireland and the Trollopian Self”

Saturday, March 25

Lisa Eck, Framingham State College
“The Individual Reader as Cheshire Cat in Reading Lolita in Tehran “
Samar Attar, Harvard University
“Arab Roots of the European Sovereign Individual of Modernity”
Lucy McNeece, The University of Connecticut
“Re-Orienting the Human: The Esoteric Self”
Deberniere Torrey, Penn State University
“Modern Confucianism in the Poetry of Tasan Chong Yak-Yong”